Drat It: Woods will remain a special place forever

12:24 AM,
Jun. 10, 2013

Written by

Gere Goble
Features editor

On a recent visit to my father's home, I realized a company that owns the adjacent property has had the land cleared.

When I was a kid, it was a scrubby, soggy piece of land with lots of briars and bushes and a few straggly trees, bordered on one side by a vacant field and the other by a swamp. The only proper tree, which stood right at the edge of the field, held the remains of a tree house my brothers had built when they were kids, a decade earlier.

I was warned from earliest childhood to resist the temptation to mess around with that tree house. It was rickety when they'd built it, and time had done it no ...